


After The Kiss

by ChokolatteJedi



Category: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Twisted Princesses - Jeftoon01
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dark, F/M, Inspired by Art, Inspired by Fanart, POV Male Character, Princes & Princesses, Slow Build, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2012-07-20
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:43:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/pseuds/ChokolatteJedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The prince becomes a bit concerned about Snow White</p>
            </blockquote>





	After The Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://th02.deviantart.net/fs39/PRE/i/2009/077/6/4/Twisted_Princess__Snow_White_by_jeftoon01.jpg) Twisted Princes image made by Jeffery Thomas.

The prince kissed her on the lips, and Snow White rose up. He pulled her onto his horse and took her off to his kingdom, where he intended that they would live happily ever. He didn't realize, however, that he was not the one who determined such things.

As the days passed, dark circles began to form around her eyes, getting darker and darker as the weeks went on. The couple always lay down together at night, and Snow White always woke when he did, but the prince began to suspect that his princess was not sleeping.

His advisors and philosophers, upon hearing of his concern, conferred, and came to the conclusion that she might be having nightmares about her time in the spelled sleep. He protested that if she was waking, she was doing it so quietly and evenly that he never once stirred. That was highly probable, his advisors and philosophers reasoned, as princesses were trained to be quiet and gentle, and she wouldn't want to wake him. He should give her a few months' grace, to recover from her ordeal.

The prince did as they suggested, but the circles only deepened.

Then he began to notice that her skin seemed too pale. According to the rumors, Snow White had always been pale as the driven snow, but as the months passed, he realized that she could also now be described as 'pale as a corpse.' Those dark circles and her lips were the only color to her entire body, and he began to suspect that she secretly colored the latter. He brought this concern to the attention of his advisors and philosophers, who reasoned that, after so much time in the sun while lying in the glass coffin, she had gotten slightly tan – relatively speaking, of course. Now that she was inside a large stone castle all day, she was resuming her normal pale coloring. The answer was simply to take her on walks in the afternoon, to help her regain a bit of her glow.

He wasn't completely satisfied with this logic, but having no better explanation, the prince did as suggested, and escorted his princess around the grounds daily.

Around this time, he noticed that her skin was cool to the touch, and he again consulted his advisors and philosophers. This time the suggestion was that she had always been cool, for the same reason that she was pale – her veins were simply very far beneath the surface of her skin. It was nothing to worry about.

That did make some sense, and also alleviated a bit of his concern over her skin tone, so the Prince attempted not to worry about it.

Then he noticed that Snow White would disappear into her sitting room for hours on end. Every time he knocked on the door, she was very quick to call out 'enter,' and he always found her stitching or embroidering, but he still felt uneasy. Once again he consulted his advisors and philosophers, and they suggested that she was now dealing with her nightmares in a constructive outlet, and that he should be glad to have such an artistic and productive bride.

So he had the servants hang the embroidered tapestries in the great hall, and attempted to ignore the odd feeling he got when he looked at them.

A few months later, just days after their first anniversary, Snow White asked to visit her friends, the seven dwarves. Delighted that she was showing an interest in something outside of her sitting room, the prince quickly agreed. He was a little disturbed, however, when she requested that the royal escort remain in the palace. She was a princess, he argued, and therefore needed protection, especially as someone had already tried to kill her.

But she persisted; her animal friends would not come near if there were other humans about, and the full-sized warriors in the protective squad would make her dwarf friends uncomfortable. These seemed like fairly reasonable reasons to his advisors and philosophers, so, ignoring the growing disturbance in the back of his mind, the prince acquiesced.

Alone, with a basket of food to share, Snow White walked into the woods, while the prince nervously watched from the castle entrance.

By nightfall, she had not returned, and the prince was ready to send out search parties. His advisors and philosophers, however, resisted, suggesting that she had spent so long chatting, as ladies were wont to, that it had become necessary to spend the night. She would appear in the morning, they insisted, and if not, then it would be time to search.

And so the prince waited the night, sleeping little, and missing the slight presence by his side.

In the morning, when he awoke, he rushed down to the castle gates, but Snow White was nowhere to be found. Not wanting to wait another hour, he called for servants to prepare his horse, and then commanded that several search parties be formed and sent out as soon as possible.

He passed the clearing where the glass coffin lay, abandoned, and barely noticed that it had been knocked over some months earlier, and was now filled with dirt and rotting leaves. He cantered on towards the miners' house, and upon arrival, jumped off his horse and sprinted to the door. The cottage was empty, but it didn't feel abandoned. Most of the dishes were cleaned, and the room was generally tidy. Snow White's basket was sitting beside the table, and a number of strange looking bottles were scattered atop it. There was one oddity, which he noted in confusion; all seven chairs appeared to have been lined up across the room and then kicked over.

Finding no other signs of life, the prince left the cottage and looked for any signs of a trail. He found faint slipper-prints on the main path, indicating Snow White's arrival, and many little booted prints on the trail to the mines, but nothing else. Deciding to head towards the mines, in case Snow White had chosen to visit them for some reason, he set off again.

By nightfall, the prince had found no sign of the dwarves or his princess, and he was extremely worried. He had heard the horn calls of the search parties throughout the afternoon, but they had tapered off as darkness absorbed the land. Even the full moon looked odd tonight, more of a brownish-gold harvest moon than the clear bluish-white he was used to. Cresting a small rise, the prince looked down into a hollow, and discovered a misshapen beast with several glowing eyes. Afraid that he was facing the monster that had captured his princess, he nevertheless mustered his courage and unshielded his lantern.

At first he felt relief, until the details of the scene before him began to sink in. There stood his Snow White, her dress ripped and mussed. In the strange lighting, the traits that had made him worry for her now took on a sinister darkness. Her eyes were invisible, replaced by sunken black hollows. Her dead white skin was washed out even more by the murky moonlight, and she clutched a mealy apple in one hand.

The prince couldn’t possibly have uttered a sound, but suddenly Snow White and half of the dwarves were staring right at him. The gleaming orange orbs he had mistaken for monster eyes were actually those of the little men, and their sharp predatory teeth were revealed as they grinned at him. It was then that he noticed the ropes around their necks that led to his beloved's arm, as a huntsman might leash his hounds.

The zombie princess glared hatefully at him, and her demonic hounds growled lowly, but the prince was frozen, unable to move. His horse had no such hesitation, and when the first dwarf stepped towards them, the stallion turned and bolted into the woods. Luckily, the creature knew the way home, because the prince's vision was still filled with the image of his beloved's frightening visage.

When the horse reached the castle doors, he finally slowed to a halt, sides streaked with sweat. The prince practically fell off him, and stumbled into the great hall. His advisors and philosophers leapt to their feet, demanding to know what had happened, but he ignored them, his eyes drawn to the eerie tapestries that his princess had created. Though he had never noticed it before, suddenly the letters along the top edges stood out in stark relief from the rest of the images. The unease with which he had always regarded the things boiled into a horrified realization as the letters strung together into a sentence.

_What's dead should stay dead._


End file.
